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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

We still seem to have >1500 deaths/day in the US. Is treatment effective but not available? Or is it just not effective?

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It's 100x more expensive than a vaccine.

I don't think it's fully available, so it's rationed for high risk cases. And it's expensive (much more so than a vaccine, you need an IV and to go sit in a hospital room for awhile)

Rationed for high risk? I’ve read about multiple politicians receiving it. I suspect it must be rationed for other reasons

Rationed for the usual reason because it's hard to make and there isn't enough to go around. That's a usual problem with monoclonal antibodies. That's also the reason they tend to be so expensive. Also if they aren't administered soon enough they generally don't work very well.

> Rationed for the usual reason because it's hard to make and there isn't enough to go around.

The technology to make monoclonal antibodies is simpler than that for mRNA vaccines.

> That's also the reason they tend to be so expensive

Economies of scale play a big role. At similar scale mab should be cheaper than mRNA.

> The technology to make monoclonal antibodies is simpler than that for mRNA vaccines.

It’s more mature technology, but unlike the mRNA vaccines it’s not cell free and as a result is harder to scale up. At similar scale mRNA will still be cheaper; that’s one if mRNA’s biggest selling points.

You need about 30 ug of MRNA vaccine. For Regeneron the dosage is an initial dose of 600 mg followed by 300 mg every other week. Pfizer is $19.50/dose. Moderna is $15/dose. Regeneron is $2100/dose. And that's with the US govt having bought millions of doses of Regeneron.

worth remembering that we have > 8000 deaths a day under normal circumstances and with covid does not necessarily mean because of covid.

We're still getting ~15,000 excess deaths every week, compared to recent similar years and given our population size. [1]

I'd like to see how to explain all 15,000 deaths per week as being simply "with Covid" instead of caused by Covid. Is it all still lockdown-related stress causing the deaths? And all of them happened to die "with Covid?"

1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

This line of reasoning from the parent comment is tedious, I don't know where it originates from but I had to debunk the same statement made by Brazilians and used the same metric as you: excess deaths are still high as a kite.

It's exhausting to be facing this misinformation spread in different languages and cultures. Even here in Sweden I have had to put up with people using flawed statistics to make a point without considering the nuances of the metrics they choose to parade around.

I'm tired.

The link you posted is just raw excess deaths. Whether they had COVID or not is unknown, so the "with COVID" vs" "from COVID" argument is irrelevant here.

While I agree with you that a significant part of those deaths are in fact from COVID, there's other explanations other than "lockdown stress" that could cause increased excess deaths - people avoiding medical treatment due to fear of catching COVID in healthcare settings, hospitals being overloaded in the first place and surgeries being delayed, or poorer health outcomes due to financial impact, which in extreme cases could cause food insecurity or homelessness.

Come on, it's been a year and a half now. Why are people still making these tired points which have been discounted all over

We all know with covid doesn't always mean because of covid, but it's statistically significant enough that dying shortly after covid gives a pretty damn good representation of the infection rate. It's statistically unlikely that you die from unrelated causes within 28 days of a positive covid test

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